Articles on: Video Consultations

An overview of Video consultation communications

When setting up video consultations, you'll also need to configure specific communications, like confirmations and reminders, to be sent to clients which contain the video access link. This unique one-time link is automatically generated when you book a video appointment, and allows the client to join the video room when clicked. Each message will need to contain the variable Next app video or Next app video link which will capture and insert the link specific to an appointment into the messages sent.

You do have the option to capture and send the access link to your clients manually (which you can read about here), but configuring confirmations and reminders will allow you to automate and streamline this part of the booking process.

Confirmation and reminder messages for video consultations are handled in the same way as the rest of the automated appointment communications available within WriteUpp, by setting up communication triggers.

You'll need to choose a:
Delivery method - SMS or Email
Message template - what message do you want to send for that particular event?
Trigger event - which tells WriteUpp when to send the message
If type is - an optional setting allowing you to link the message to a particular appointment type only
Timeframe - when to send the message. You can choose a defined "when" for a reminder message, but everything else will be sent immediately

Message templates



We've added a few default templates to get you up and running with video communications. For both SMS and Email, you'll see templates for:
New Video Appointment Confirmation
New Recurring Video Appointment Confirmation
Video Appointment Reminder

They are pretty simple and designed to contain the key information that you need for these appointments. You can see the default content of these messages for SMS here and for email here.

You can of course edit these to add information specific to your practice, or create your own templates to use. You can read more about managing your email templates here, and about managing your SMS templates here.

When creating your own templates to use, just make sure that you include one of the variables available, either Next app video or Next app video link, in the content to ensure the video access link is captured and inserted into your message. Using this link is the only way for your clients to access their video consultation so to save yourself the hassle of manually sending this out, it's really important to make sure you include it in your automated messages!

Bear in mind that if you're using SMS to deliver confirmations or reminders, 1 message of 160 characters uses 1 credit. Inserting the Video URL link may take the content over 160 characters and therefore use more than 1 credit per message

Trigger events



The trigger events available which are specific to video consultations are:
New video appointment - Single: Will send a message when a new single video appointment is booked (ie, you leave recurrence as None)
New video appointment - Recurring: Will send a message when a new recurring series of video appointments is booked
Online booking video appointment: Will send a message when a new video appointment is booked directly by a patient via online booking
Video appointment reminder: Will send a reminder message at a defined time prior to an appointment

To give you a reference point, using each of the above trigger events for delivery by both SMS and Email, your list of communication triggers might look something like this:



If you joined WriteUpp after 23/04/2020, the video consultation communications are set up for you as part of WriteUpp's default configuration.

If you don't see any of the video communications present in your current list and you'd like to set them up, you can follow the step by step guides in the links below:

Creating a confirmation of a video consultation
Creating a confirmation of a recurring video consultation
Creating a confirmation of a video consultation booked via Online Booking
Creating a reminder of a video consultation

Updated on: 17/06/2022

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